The Port Huron Statement

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort,
housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we
inherit.

When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest
country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least
scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we
thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world.
Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and
for the people — these American values we found good, principles
by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling
to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human
degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial
bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second,
the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of
the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends,
and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly
because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately
ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but
not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their
impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take
the responsibility for encounter and resolution.

While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or
rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns,
we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding
America. The declaration "all men are created equal . . . rang
hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities
of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States
contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War
status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear
energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates
seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred
in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying
old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate
meaningless work and idleness. While two–thirds of mankind suffers
undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous
abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty
years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of
international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the
sapping of the earth’s physical resources. Although mankind desperately
needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate,
its goals ambiguous and tradition–bound instead of informed and
clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than
"of, by, and for the people."

Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not
only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals
was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally
seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era.
The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism,
the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation,
international disorder, supertechnology — these trends were testing
the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and
our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation
in the experiment with living. But we are a minority — the vast
majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our
society and world as eternally–functional parts. In this is perhaps
the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet
the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative
to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians,
beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through",
beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the
future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives,
that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias,
but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity
upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that
at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change
itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems
to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades
are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy
in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for
change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the
minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly
dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform,
thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially
improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened
the case for further change.

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst
prosperity — but might it not better be called a glaze above deeplyfelt
anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties
produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as
well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the
present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the
school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is
to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change,
that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic
alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation
with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which
moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer
this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding
and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century,
an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of
man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.

Values

Making values explicit — an initial task in establishing alternatives
— is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted. The conventional
moral terms of the age, the politician moralities — "free
world", "people’s democracies" — reflect realities
poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than
as descriptive principles. But neither has our experience in the
universities brought as moral enlightenment. Our professors and
administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their
curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world;
their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms
race; passion is called unscholastic. The questions we might want
raised — what is really important? can we live in a different and
better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it?
— are not thought to be questions of a "fruitful, empirical
nature", and thus are brushed aside.

Unlike youth in other countries we are used to moral leadership
being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders.
But today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments
of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present. Consider
the old slogans; Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against
Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently,
No Cooperation with Commies and Fellow Travellers, Ideologies Are
Exhausted, Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and
there are few new prophets. It has been said that our liberal and
socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while
our own generation is plagued by program without vision. All around
us there is astute grasp of method, technique — the committee,
the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, that hard and soft sell, the make,
the projected image — but, if pressed critically, such expertise
is incompetent to explain its implicit ideals. It is highly fashionable
to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected
political figure, or by explaining "how we would vote"
on various issues.

Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old —
and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, men have condemned
idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness — and men act out
a defeatism that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and
hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today.
The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted
by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes
men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human
activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of
the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas–ovens and concentration
camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic
is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations,
on the contrary, is to be "toughminded".

In suggesting social goals and values, therefore, we are aware
of entering a sphere of some disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past,
we have no sure formulas, no closed theories — but that does not
mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A
first task of any social movement is to convenience people that
the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values
is complex but worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes
we must analyze the concrete conditions of social order. But to
direct such an analysis we must use the guideposts of basic principles.
Our own social values involve conceptions of human beings, human
relationships, and social systems.

We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled
capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In affirming these principles
we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man
in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated,
and that he is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs.
We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the
status of things — if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth
century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague
appeals to "posterity" cannot justify the mutilations
of the present. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence
because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been
"competently" manipulated into incompetence — we see
little reason why men cannot meet with increasing skill the complexities
and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized
not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision–making.

Men have unrealized potential for self–cultivation, self–direction,
self–understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we
regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality
for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of
man and society should be human independence: a concern not with
image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally
authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense
of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values,
nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which
has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one
which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one
which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved:
one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense
of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.

This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism
— the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have
a way that is one’s own. Nor do we deify man — we merely have faith
in his potential.

Human relationships should involve fraternity and honesty. Human
interdependence is contemporary fact; human brotherhood must be
willed however, as a condition of future survival and as the most
appropriate form of social relations. Personal links between man
and man are needed, especially to go beyond the partial and fragmentary
bonds of function that bind men only as worker to worker, employer
to employee, teacher to student, American to Russian.

Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance
between man and man today. These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome
by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only
when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by
man.

As the individualism we affirm is not egoism, the selflessness
we affirm is not self–elimination. On the contrary, we believe in
generosity of a kind that imprints one’s unique individual qualities
in the relation to other men, and to all human activity. Further,
to dislike isolation is not to favor the abolition of privacy; the
latter differs from isolation in that it occurs or is abolished
according to individual will. Finally, we would replace power and
personal uniqueness rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance
by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason,
and creativity.

As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of
individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the
individual share in those social decisions determining the quality
and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage
independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.

In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based
in several root principles:

that decision–making of basic social consequence be carried
on by public groupings;

that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating
an acceptable pattern of social relations;

that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation
and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient,
means of finding meaning in personal life;

that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a
way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for
the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views
should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilities the
attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to related
men to knowledge and to power so that private problems — from bad
recreation facilities to personal alienation — are formulated as
general issues.

The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:

that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival.
It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical;
selfdirect, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect
for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social
responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence
on habits, perceptions and individual ethics;

that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the
individual must share in its full determination;

that the economy itself is of such social importance that its
major resources and means of production should be open to democratic
participation and subject to democratic social regulation.

Like the political and economic ones, major social institutions
— cultural, education, rehabilitative, and others — should be
generally organized with the well–being and dignity of man as the
essential measure of success.

In social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent
because it requires generally the transformation of the target,
be it a human being or a community of people, into a depersonalized
object of hate. It is imperative that the means of violence be abolished
and the institutions — local, national, international — that encourage
nonviolence as a condition of conflict be developed.

These are our central values, in skeletal form. It remains vital
to understand their denial or attainment in the context of the modern
world.

The Students

In the last few years, thousands of American students demonstrated
that they at least felt the urgency of the times. They moved actively
and directly against racial injustices, the threat of war, violations
of individual rights of conscience and, less frequently, against
economic manipulation. They succeeded in restoring a small measure
of controversy to the campuses after the stillness of the McCarthy
period. They succeeded, too, in gaining some concessions from the
people and institutions they opposed, especially in the fight against
racial bigotry.

The significance of these scattered movements lies not in their
success or failure in gaining objectives — at least not yet. Nor
does the significance lie in the intellectual "competence"
or "maturity" of the students involved — as some pedantic
elders allege. The significance is in the fact the students are
breaking the crust of apathy and overcoming the inner alienation
that remain the defining characteristics of American college life.

If student movements for change are rarities still on the campus
scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar
campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious
"inner emigration." It is a place of commitment to business–as–usual,
getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation
of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public
stance. Rules are accepted as "inevitable", bureaucracy
as "just circumstances", irrelevance as "scholarship",
selflessness as "martyrdom", politics as "just another
way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too."

Almost no students value activity as a citizen. Passive in public,
they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives:
Gallup concludes they will settle for "low success, and won’t
risk high failure." There is not much willingness to take risks
(not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception
of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of others,
no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful
as the very successful people. Attention is being paid to social
status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives
or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much too, is paid
to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat–race). But
neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation
of the mind.

"Students don’t even give a damn about the apathy," one
has said. Apathy toward apathy begets a privately–constructed universe,
a place of systematic study schedules, two nights each week for
beer, a girl or two, and early marriage; a framework infused with
personality, warmth, and under control, no matter how unsatisfying
otherwise.

Under these conditions university life loses all relevance to some.
Four hundred thousand of our classmates leave college every year.

But apathy is not simply an attitude; it is a product of social
institutions, and of the structure and organization of higher education
itself. The extracurricular life is ordered according to in loco
parentis theory, which ratifies the Administration as the moral
guardian of the young. The accompanying "let’s pretend"
theory of student extracurricular affairs validates student government
as a training center for those who want to spend their lives in
political pretense, and discourages initiative from more articulate,
honest, and sensitive students. The bounds and style of controversy
are delimited before controversy begins. The university "prepares"
the student for "citizenship" through perpetual rehearsals
and, usually, through emasculation of what creative spirit there
is in the individual.

The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way
in which extracurricular life is organized. The academic world is
founded in a teacher–student relation analogous to the parent–child
relation which characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academia
includes a radical separation of student from the material of study.
That which is studied, the social reality, is "objectified"
to sterility, dividing the student from life — just as he is restrained
in active involvement by the deans controlling student government.
The specialization of function and knowledge, admittedly necessary
to our complex technological and social structure, has produced
and exaggerated compartmentalization of study and understanding.
This has contributed to: an overly parochial view, by faculty, of
the role of its research and scholarship; a discontinuous and truncated
understanding, by students, of the surrounding social order; a loss
of personal attachment, by nearly all, to the worth of study as
a humanistic enterprise.

There is, finally, the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending
throughout the academic as well as extracurricular structures, contributing
to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms
so many students from honest searching to ratification of convention
and, worse, to a numbness of present and future catastrophes. The
size and financing systems of the university enhance the permanent
trusteeship of the administrative bureaucracy, their power leading
to a shift to the value standards of business and administrative
mentality within the university. Huge foundations and other private
financial interests shape under–financed colleges and universities,
not only making them more commercial, but less disposed to diagnose
society critically, less open to dissent. Many social and physical
scientists, neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning,
develop "human relations" or morale–producing" techniques
for the corporate economy, while others exercise their intellectual
skills to accelerate the arms race.

Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source
of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of
attitudes. But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience
is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications
channel — say, a television set — passing on the stock truths
of the day. Students leave college somewhat more "tolerant"
than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values
and political orientations. With administrators ordering the institutions,
and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation
to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to
accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the
educational system — as opposed to its more rhetorical function
of "searching for truth" — is to impart the key information
and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably,
in the big society beyond.

The Society Beyond

Look beyond the campus, to America itself. That student life is
more intellectual, and perhaps more comfortable, does not obscure
the fact that the fundamental qualities of life on the campus reflect
the habits of society at large. The fraternity president is seen
at the junior manager levels; the sorority queen has gone to Grosse
Pointe: the serious poet burns for a place, any place, or work;
the once–serious and never serious poets work at the advertising
agencies. The desperation of people threatened by forces about which
they know little and of which they can say less; the cheerful emptiness
of people "giving up" all hope of changing things; the
faceless ones polled by Gallup who listed "international affairs"
fourteenth on their list of "problems" but who also expected
thermonuclear war in the next few years: in these and other forms,
Americans are in withdrawal from public life, from any collective
effort at directing their own affairs.

Some regard this national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval
of the established order — but is it approval by consent or manipulated
acquiescence? Others declare that the people are withdrawn because
compelling issues are fast disappearing — perhaps there are fewer
breadlines in America, but is Jim Crow gone, is there enough work
and work more fulfilling, is world war a diminishing threat, and
what of the revolutionary new peoples? Still others think the national
quietude is a necessary consequence of the need for elites to resolve
complex and specialized problems of modern industrial society —
but, then, why should business elites help decide foreign policy,
and who controls the elites anyway, and are they solving mankind’s
problems? Others, finally, shrug knowingly and announce that full
democracy never worked anywhere in the past — but why lump qualitatively
different civilizations together, and how can a social order work
well if its best thinkers are skeptics, and is man really doomed
forever to the domination of today?

There are no convincing apologies for the contemporary malaise.
While the world tumbles toward the final war, while men in other
nations are trying desperately to alter events, while the very future
qua future is uncertain — America is without community, impulse,
without the inner momentum necessary for an age when societies cannot
successfully perpetuate themselves by their military weapons, when
democracy must be viable because of its quality of life, not its
quantity of rockets.

The apathy here is, first subjective — the felt powerlessness
of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events.
But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation
— the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant
knowledge, from pinnacles of decision–making. Just as the university
influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions
create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try
hopelessly to understand his world and himself.

The very isolation of the individual — from power and community
and ability to aspire — means the rise of a democracy without publics.
With the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically
hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions
themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle,
progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious
participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection
between community and leadership, between the mass and the several
elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies
go unchallenged time and again.

Politics without Publics

The American political system is not the democratic model of which
its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing
the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating
the irresponsible power of military and business interests.

A crucial feature of the political apparatus in America is that
greater differences are harbored within each major party than the
differences existing between them. Instead of two parties presenting
distinctive and significant differences of approach, what dominates
the system if a natural interlocking of Democrats from Southern
states with the more conservative elements of the Republican party.
This arrangement of forces is blessed by the seniority system of
Congress which guarantees congressional committee domination by
conservatives — ten of 17 committees in the Senate and 13 of 21
in House of Representatives are chaired currently by Dixiecrats.

The party overlap, however, is not the only structural antagonist
of democracy in politics. First, the localized nature of the party
system does not encourage discussion of national and international
issues: thus problems are not raised by and for people, and political
representatives usually are unfettered from any responsibilities
to the general public except those regarding parochial matters.
Second, whole constituencies are divested of the full political
power they might have: many Negroes in the South are prevented from
voting, migrant workers are disenfranchised by various residence
requirements, some urban and suburban dwellers are victimized by
gerrymandering, and poor people are too often without the power
to obtain political representation. Third, the focus of political
attention is significantly distorted by the enormous lobby force,
composed predominantly of business interests, spending hundreds
of millions each year in an attempt to conform facts about productivity,
agriculture, defense, and social services, to the wants of private
economic groupings.

What emerges from the party contradictions and insulation of privatelyheld
power is the organized political stalemate: calcification dominates
flexibility as the principle of parliamentary organization, frustration
is the expectancy of legislators intending liberal reform, and Congress
becomes less and less central to national decision–making, especially
in the area of foreign policy. In this context, confusion and blurring
is built into the formulation of issues, long–range priorities are
not discussed in the rational manner needed for policymaking, the
politics of personality and "image" become a more important
mechanism than the construction of issues in a way that affords
each voter a challenging and real option. The American voter is
buffeted from all directions by pseudo–problems, by the structurally–initiated
sense that nothing political is subject to human mastery. Worried
by his mundane problems which never get solved, but constrained
by the common belief that politics is an agonizingly slow accommodation
of views, he quits all pretense of bothering.

A most alarming fact is that few, if any, politicians are calling
for changes in these conditions. Only a handful even are calling
on the President to "live up to" platform pledges; no
one is demanding structural changes, such as the shuttling of Southern
Democrats out of the Democratic Party. Rather than protesting the
state of politics, most politicians are reinforcing and aggravating
that state. While in practice they rig public opinion to suit their
own interests, in word and ritual they enshrine "the sovereign
public" and call for more and more letters. Their speeches
and campaign actions are banal, based on a degrading conception
of what people want to hear. They respond not to dialogue, but to
pressure: and knowing this, the ordinary citizen sees even greater
inclination to shun the political sphere. The politicians is usually
a trumpeter to "citizenship" and "service to the
nation", but since he is unwilling to seriously rearrange power
relationships, his trumpetings only increase apathy by creating
no outlets. Much of the time the call to "service" is
justified not in idealistic terms, but in the crasser terms of "defending
the free world from communism" — thus making future idealistic
impulses harder to justify in anything but Cold War terms.

In such a setting of status quo politics, where most if not all
government activity is rationalized in Cold War anti–communist terms,
it is somewhat natural that discontented, super–patriotic groups
would emerge through political channels and explain their ultra–conservatism
as the best means of Victory over Communism. They have become a
politically influential force within the Republican Party, at a
national level through Senator Goldwater, and at a local level through
their important social and economic roles. Their political views
are defined generally as the opposite of the supposed views of communists:
complete individual freedom in the economic sphere, non–participation
by the government in the machinery of production. But actually "anticommunism"
becomes an umbrella by which to protest liberalism, internationalism,
welfarism, the active civil rights and labor movements. It is to
the disgrace of the United States that such a movement should become
a prominent kind of public participation in the modern world —
but, ironically, it is somewhat to the interests of the United States
that such a movement should be a public constituency pointed toward
realignment of the political parties, demanding a conservative Republican
Party in the South and an exclusion of the "leftist" elements
of the national GOP.

The Economy

American capitalism today advertises itself as the Welfare State.
Many of us comfortably expect pensions, medical care, unemployment
compensation, and other social services in our lifetimes. Even with
one–fourth of our productive capacity unused, the majority of Americans
are living in relative comfort — although their nagging incentive
to "keep up" makes them continually dissatisfied with
their possessions. In many places, unrestrained bosses, uncontrolled
machines, and sweatshop conditions have been reformed or abolished
and suffering tremendously relieved. But in spite of the benign
yet obscuring effects of the New Deal reforms and the reassuring
phrases of government economists and politicians, the paradoxes
and myths of the economy are sufficient to irritate our complacency
and reveal to us some essential causes of the American malaise.

We live amidst a national celebration of economic prosperity while
poverty and deprivation remain an unbreakable way of life for millions
in the "affluent society", including many of our own generation.
We hear glib reference to the "welfare state", "free
enterprise", and "shareholder’s democracy" while
military defense is the main item of "public" spending
and obvious oligopoly and other forms of minority rule defy real
individual initiative or popular control. Work, too, is often unfulfilling
and victimizing, accepted as a channel to status or plenty, if not
a way to pay the bills, rarely as a means of understanding and controlling
self and events. In work and leisure the individual is regulated
as part of the system, a consuming unit, bombarded by hardsell soft–sell,
lies and semi–true appeals and his basest drives. He is always told
what he is supposed to enjoy while being told, too, that he is a
"free" man because of "free enterprise."

The Remote Control Economy. We are subject to a remote control
economy, which excludes the mass of individual "units"
— the people — from basic decisions affecting the nature and organization
of work, rewards, and opportunities. The modern concentration of
wealth is fantastic. The wealthiest one percent of Americans own
more than 80 percent of all personal shares of stock. From World
War II until the mid–Fifties, the 50 biggest corporations increased
their manufacturing production from 17 to 23 percent of the national
total, and the share of the largest 200 companies rose from 30 to
37 percent. To regard the various decisions of these elites as purely
economic is short–sighted: their decisions affect in a momentous
way the entire fabric of social life in America. Foreign investments
influence political policies in under–developed areas — and our
efforts to build a "profitable" capitalist world blind
our foreign policy to mankind’s needs and destiny. The drive for
sales spurs phenomenal advertising efforts; the ethical drug industry,
for instance, spent more than $750 million on promotions in 1960,
nearly for times the amount available to all American medical schools
for their educational programs. The arts, too, are organized substantially
according to their commercial appeal aesthetic values are subordinated
to exchange values, and writers swiftly learn to consider the commercial
market as much as the humanistic marketplace of ideas. The tendency
to over–production, to gluts of surplus commodities, encourages
"market research" techniques to deliberately create pseudo–needs
in consumers — we learn to buy "smart" things, regardless
of their utility — and introduces wasteful "planned obsolescence"
as a permanent feature of business strategy. While real social needs
accumulate as rapidly as profits, it becomes evident that Money,
instead of dignity of character, remains a pivotal American value
and Profitability, instead of social use, a pivotal standard in
determining priorities of resource allocation.

Within existing arrangements, the American business community cannot
be said to encourage a democratic process nationally. Economic minorities
not responsible to a public in any democratic fashion make decisions
of a more profound importance than even those made by Congress.
Such a claim is usually dismissed by respectful and knowing citations
of the ways in which government asserts itself as keeper of the
public interest at times of business irresponsibility. But the real,
as opposed to the mythical, range of government "control"
of the economy includes only:

Some limited "regulatory" powers — which usually
just ratify industry policies or serve as palliatives at the margins
of significant business activity;

A fiscal policy build upon defense expenditures as pump–priming
"public works" — without a significant emphasis on "peaceful
public works" to meet social priorities and alleviate personal
hardships;

Limited fiscal and monetary weapons which are rigid and have
only minor effects, and are greatly limited by corporate veto: tax
cuts and reforms; interest rate control (used generally to tug on
investment by hurting the little investor most); tariffs which protect
noncompetitive industries with political power and which keep less–favored
nations out of the large trade mainstream, as the removal of barriers
reciprocally with the Common Market may do disastrously to emerging
countries outside of Europe; wage arbitration, the use of government
coercion in the name of "public interest" to hide the
tensions between workers and business production controllers; price
controls, which further maintains the status quo of big ownership
and flushes out little investors for the sake of "stability";

Very limited "poverty–solving" which is designed for
the organized working class but not the shut–out, poverty–stricken
migrants, farm workers, the indigent unaware of medical care or
the lower–middle class person riddled with medical bills, the "unhireables"
of minority groups or workers over 45 years of age, etc.

Regional development programs — such as the Area Redevelopment
Act — which have been only "trickle down" welfare programs
without broad authority for regional planning and development and
public works spending. The federal highway program has been more
significant than the "depressed areas" program in meeting
the needs of people, but is generally too remote and does not reach
the vicious circle of poverty itself.

In short, the theory of government "countervailing" business
neglects the extent to which government influence is marginal to
the basic production decisions, the basic decision–making environment
of society, the basic structure or distribution and allocation which
is still determined by major corporations with power and wealth
concentrated among the few. A conscious conspiracy — as in the
case of pricerigging in the electrical industry — is by no means
generally or continuously operative but power undeniably does rest
in comparative insulation from the public and its political representatives.

The Military–Industrial Complex. The most spectacular and important
creation of the authoritarian and oligopolistic structure of economic
decision–making in America is the institution called "the militaryindustrial
complex" by former President Eisenhower, the powerful congruence
of interest and structure among military and business elites which
affects so much of our development and destiny. Not only is ours
the first generation to live with the possibility of world–wide
cataclysm — it is the first to experience the actual social preparation
for cataclysm, the general militarization of American society. In
1948 Congress established Universal Military Training, the first
peacetime conscription. The military became a permanent institution.
Four years earlier, General Motor’s Charles E. Wilson had heralded
the creation of what he called the "permanent war economy,"
the continuous use of military spending as a solution to economic
problems unsolved before the post–war boom, most notably the problem
of the seventeen million jobless after eight years of the New Deal.
This has left a "hidden crisis" in the allocation of resources
by the American economy.

Since our childhood these two trends — the rise of the military
and the installation of a defense–based economy — have grown fantastically.
The Department of Defense, ironically the world’s largest single
organization, is worth $160 billion, owns 32 million acres of America
and employs half the 7.5 million persons directly dependent on the
military for subsistence, has an $11 billion payroll which is larger
than the net annual income of all American corporations. Defense
spending in the Eisenhower era totaled $350 billions and President
Kennedy entered office pledged to go even beyond the present defense
allocation of sixty cents from every public dollar spent. Except
for a war–induced boom immediately after "our side" bombed
Hiroshima, American economic prosperity has coincided with a growing
dependence on military outlay — from 1941 to 1959 America’s Gross
National Product of $5.25 trillion included $700 billion in goods
and services purchased for the defense effort, about one–seventh
of the accumulated GNP. This pattern has included the steady concentration
of military spending among a few corporations. In 1961, 86 percent
of Defense Department contracts were awarded without competition.
The ordnance industry of 100,000 people is completely engaged in
military work; in the aircraft industry, 94 percent of 750,000 workers
are linked to the war economy; shipbuilding, radio and communications
equipment industries commit forty percent of their work to defense;
iron and steel, petroleum, metal–stamping and machine shop products,
motors and generators, tools and hardware, copper, aluminum and
machine tools industries all devote at least 10 percent of their
work to the same cause.

The intermingling of Big Military and Big Industry is evidenced
in the 1,400 former officers working for the 100 corporations who
received nearly all the $21 billion spent in procurement by the
Defense Department in 1961. The overlap is most poignantly clear
in the case of General Dynamics, the company which received the
best 1961 contracts, employed the most retired officers (187), and
is directed by a former Secretary of the Army. A Fortune magazine
profile of General Dynamics said: "The unique group of men
who run Dynamics are only incidentally in rivalry with other U.S.
manufacturers, with many of whom they actually act in concert. Their
chief competitor is the USSR. The core of General Dynamics corporate
philosophy is the conviction that national defense is a more or
less permanent business." Little has changed since Wilson’s
proud declaration of the Permanent War Economy back in the 1944
days when the top 200 corporations possessed 80 percent of all active
prime war–supply contracts.

Military Industrial Politics. The military and its supporting business
foundation have found numerous forms of political expression, and
we have heard their din endlessly. There has not been a major Congressional
split on the issue of continued defense spending spirals in our
lifetime. The triangular relation of the business, military and
political arenas cannot be better expressed than in Dixiecrat Carl
Vinson’s remarks as his House Armed Services Committee reported
out a military construction bill of $808 million throughout the
50 states, for 1960–61: "There is something in this bill for
everyone," he announced. President Kennedy had earlier acknowledged
the valuable anti–recession features of the bill.

Imagine, on the other hand, $808 million suggested as an anti–recession
measure, but being poured into programs of social welfare: the impossibility
of receiving support for such a measure identifies a crucial feature
of defense spending: it is beneficial to private enterprise, while
welfare spending is not. Defense spending does not "compete"
with the private sector; it contains a natural obsolescence; its
"confidential" nature permits easier boondoggling; the
tax burdens to which it leads can be shunted from corporation to
consumer as a "cost of production." Welfare spending,
however, involves the government in competition with private corporations
and contractors; it conflicts with immediate interests of private
pressure groups; it leads to taxes on business. Think of the opposition
of private power companies to current proposals for river and valley
development, or the hostility of the real estate lobby to urban
renewal; or the attitude of the American Medical Association to
a paltry medical care bill; or of all business lobbyists to foreign
aid; these are the pressures leading to the schizophrenic public–military,
private–civilian economy of our epoch. The politicians, of course,
take the line of least resistance and thickest support: warfare,
instead of welfare, is easiest to stand up for: after all, the Free
World is at stake (and our constituency’s investments, too).

Automation, Abundance, and Challenge. But while the economy remains
relatively static in its setting of priorities and allocation of
resources, new conditions are emerging with enormous implications:
the revolution of automation, and the replacement of scarcity by
the potential of material abundance.

Automation, the process of machines replacing men in performing
sensory, motoric and complex logical tasks, is transforming society
in ways that are scarcely comprehensible. By 1959, industrial production
regained its 1957 "pre–recession" level — but with 750,000
fewer workers required. In the Fifties as a whole, national production
enlarged by 43 percent but the number of factory employees remained
stationary, seventenths of one percent higher than in 1947. Automation
is destroying whole categories of work — impersonal thinkers have
efficiently labeled this "structural unemployment" —
in blue–collar, service, and even middle management occupations.
In addition it is eliminating employment opportunities for a youth
force that numbers one million more than it did in 1950, and rendering
work far more difficult both to find and do for people in the forties
and up. The consequences of this economic drama, strengthened by
the force of post–war recessions, are momentous: five million becomes
an acceptable unemployment tabulation, and misery, uprootedness
and anxiety become the lot of increasing numbers of Americans.

But while automation is creating social dislocation of a stunning
kind, it paradoxically is imparting the opportunity for men the
world around to rise in dignity from their knees. The dominant optimistic
economic fact of this epoch is that fewer hands are needed now in
actual production, although more goods and services are a real potentiality.
The world could be fed, poverty abolished, the great public needs
could be met, the brutish world of Darwinian scarcity could be brushed
away, all men could have more time to pursue their leisure, drudgery
in work could be cut to a minimum, education could become more of
a continuing process for all people, both public and personal needs
could be met rationally. But only in a system with selfish production
motives and elitist control, a system which is less welfare than
war–based, undemocratic rather than "stockholder participative"
as "sold to us", does the potentiality for abundance become
a curse and a cruel irony:

Automation brings unemployment instead of mere leisure for
all and greater achievement of needs for all people in the world
— a crisis instead of economic utopia. Instead of being introduced
into a social system in a planned and equitable way, automation
is initiated according to its profitability. American Telephone
and Telegraph holds back modern telephone equipment, invented with
public research funds, until present equipment is financially unprofitable.
Colleges develop teaching machines, mass–class techniques, and TV
education to replace teachers: not to proliferate knowledge or to
assist the qualified professors now, but to "cut costs in education
and make the academic community more efficient and less wasteful."
Technology, which could be a blessing to society, becomes more and
more a sinister threat to humanistic and rational enterprise.

Hard–core poverty exists just beyond the neon lights of affluence,
and the "have–nots" may be driven still further from opportunity
as the high–technology society demands better education to get into
the production mainstream and more capital investment to get into
"business". Poverty is shameful in that it herds people
by race, region, and previous condition of infortune into "uneconomic
classes" in the so–called free society — the marginal worker
is made more insecure by automation and high education requirements,
heavier competition for jobs, maintaining low wages or a high level
of unemployment. People in the rut of poverty are strikingly unable
to overcome the collection of forces working against them: poor
health, bad neighborhoods, miserable schools, inadequate "welfare"
services, unemployment and underemployment, weak politician and
union organization.

Surplus and potential plenty are waste domestically and producers
suffer impoverishment because the real needs of the world and of
our society are not reflected in the market. Our huge bins of decomposing
grain are classic American examples, as is the steel industry which,
in the summer of 1962, is producing at 53 percent of capacity.

The Stance of Labor. Amidst all this, what of organized labor,
the historic institutional representative of the exploited, the
presumed "countervailing power" against the excesses of
Big Business? The contemporary social assault on the labor movement
is of crisis proportions. To the average American, "big labor"
is a growing cancer equal in impact to Big Business — nothing could
be more distorted, even granting a sizable union bureaucracy. But
in addition to public exaggerations, the labor crisis can be measured
in several ways. First, the high expectations of the newborn AFL–CIO
of 30 million members by 1965 are suffering a reverse unimaginable
five years ago. The demise of the dream of "organizing the
unorganized" is dramatically reflected in the AFL–CIO decision,
just two years after its creation, to slash its organizing staff
in half. From 15 million members when the AFL and the CIO merged,
the total has slipped to 13.5 million. During the post–war generation,
union membership nationally has increased by four million — but
the total number of workers has jumped by 13 million. Today only
40 percent of all non–agricultural workers are protected by any
form or organization. Second, organizing conditions are going to
worsen. Where labor now is strongest — in industries — automation
is leading to an attrition of available work. As the number of jobs
dwindles, so does labor’s power of bargaining, since management
can handle a strike in an automated plant more easily than the older
mass–operated ones.

More important perhaps, the American economy has changed radically
in the last decade, as suddenly the number of workers producing
goods became fewer than the number in "nonproductive"
areas — government, trade, finance, services, utilities, transportation.
Since World War II "white collar" and "service"
jobs have grown twice as fast as have, "blue collar" production
jobs. Labor has almost no organization in the expanding occupational
areas of the new economy, but almost all of its entrenched strength
in contracting areas. As big government hires more, as business
seeks more office workers and skilled technicians, and as growing
commercial America demands new hotels, service stations and the
like, the conditions will become graver still. Further, there is
continuing hostility to labor by the Southern states and their industrial
interests — meaning " runaway plants, cheap labor threatening
the organized trade union movement, and opposition from Dixiecrats
to favorable labor legislation in Congress. Finally, there is indication
that Big Business, for the sake of public relations if nothing more,
has acknowledged labor’s "right" to exist, but has deliberately
tried to contain labor at its present strength, preventing strong
unions from helping weaker ones or from spreading or unorganized
sectors of the economy. Business is aided in its efforts by proliferation
of "right–to–work" laws at state levels (especially in
areas where labor is without organizing strength to begin with),
and anti–labor legislation in Congress.

In the midst of these besetting crises, labor itself faces its
own problems of vision and program. Historically, there can be no
doubt as to its worth in American politics — what progress there
has been in meeting human needs in this century rests greatly with
the labor movement. And to a considerable extent the social democracy
for which labor has fought externally is reflected in its own essentially
democratic character: representing millions of people, no millions
of dollars; demanding their welfare, not eternal profit. Today labor
remains the most liberal "mainstream" institution — but
often its liberalism represents vestigial commitments self–interestedness,
unradicalism. In some measure labor has succumbed to institutionalization,
its social idealism waning under the tendencies of bureaucracy,
materialism, business ethics. The successes of the last generation
perhaps have braked, rather than accelerated labor’s zeal for change.
Even the House of Labor has bay windows: not only is this true of
the labor elites, but as well of some of the rank–and–file. Many
of the latter are indifferent unionists, uninterested in meetings,
alienated from the complexities of the labor–management negotiating
apparatus, lulled to comfort by the accessibility of luxury and
the opportunity of long–term contracts. "Union democracy"
is not simply inhibited by labor leader elitism, but by the unrelated
problem of rankand –file apathy to the tradition of unionism. The
crisis of labor is reflected in the coexistence within the unions
of militant Negro discontents and discriminatory locals, sweeping
critics of the obscuring "public interest" marginal tinkering
of government and willing handmaidens of conservative political
leadership, austere sacrificers and business–like operators, visionaries
and anachronisms — tensions between extremes that keep alive the
possibilities for a more militant unionism. Too, there are seeds
of rebirth in the "organizational crisis" itself: the
technologically unemployed, the unorganized white collar men and
women, the migrants and farm workers, the unprotected Negroes, the
poor, all of whom are isolated now from the power structure of the
economy, but who are the potential base for a broader and more forceful
unionism.

Horizon. In summary: a more reformed, more human capitalism, functioning
at three–fourths capacity while one–third of America and two–thirds
of the world goes needy, domination of politics and the economy
by fantastically rich elites, accommodation and limited effectiveness
by the labor movement, hard–core poverty and unemployment, automation
confirming the dark ascension of machine over man instead of shared
abundance, technological change being introduced into the economy
by the criteria of profitability — this has been our inheritance.
However inadequate, it has instilled quiescence in liberal hearts
— partly reflecting the extent to which misery has been over–come
but also the eclipse of social ideals. Though many of us are "affluent",
poverty, waste, elitism, manipulation are too manifest to go unnoticed,
too clearly unnecessary to go accepted. To change the Cold War status
quo and other social evils, concern with the challenges to the American
economic machine must expand. Now, as a truly better social state
becomes visible, a new poverty impends: a poverty of vision, and
a poverty of political action to make that vision reality. Without
new vision, the failure to achieve our potentialities will spell
the inability of our society to endure in a world of obvious, crying
needs and rapid change.

The Individual in the Welfare State

Business and politics, when significantly militarized, affect the
whole living condition of each American citizen. Worker and family
depend on the Cold War for life. Half of all research and development
is concentrated on military ends. The press mimics conventional
cold war opinion in its editorials. In less than a full generation,
most Americans accept the military–industrial structure as "the
way things are." War is still pictured as one more kind of
diplomacy, perhaps a gloriously satisfying kind. Our saturation
and atomic bombings of Germany and Japan are little more than memories
of past "policy necessities" that preceded the wonderful
economic boom of 1946. The facts that our once–revolutionary 20,000
ton Hiroshima Bomb is now paled by 50 megaton weapons, that our
lifetime has included the creation of intercontinental ballistic
missiles, that "greater" weapons are to follow, that weapons
refinement is more rapid than the development of weapons of defense,
that soon a dozen or more nations will have the Bomb, that one simple
miscalculation could incinerate mankind: these orienting facts are
but remotely felt. A shell of moral callous separates the citizen
from sensitivity of the common peril: this is the result of a lifetime
saturation with horror. After all, some ask, where could we begin,
even if we wanted to? After all, others declare, we can only assume
things are in the best of hands. A coed at the University of Kentucky
says, "we regard peace and war as fairy tales." And a
child has asked in helplessness, perhaps for us all, "Daddy,
why is there a cold war?"

Past senselessness permits present brutality; present brutality
is prelude to future deeds of still greater inhumanity; that is
the moral history of the twentieth century, from the First World
War to the present. A half–century of accelerating destruction has
flattened out the individual’s ability to make moral distinction,
it has made people understandably give up, it has forced private
worry and public silence.

To a decisive extent, the means of defense, the military technology
itself, determines the political and social character of the state
being defended — that is, defense mechanism themselves in the nuclear
age alter the character of the system that creates them for protection.
So it has been with American, as her democratic institutions and
habits have shriveled in almost direct proportion to the growth
of her armaments. Decisions about military strategy, including the
monstrous decision to go to war, are more and more the property
of the military and the industrial arms race machine, with the politicians
assuming a ratifying role instead of a determining one. This is
increasingly a fact not just because of the installation of the
permanent military, but because of constant revolutions in military
technology. The new technologies allegedly require military expertise,
scientific comprehension, and the mantle of secrecy. As Congress
relies more and more on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the existing
chasm between people and decision–makers becomes irreconcilably
wide, and more alienating in its effects.

A necessary part of the military effort is propaganda: to "sell"
the need for congressional appropriations, to conceal various business
scandals, and to convince the American people that the arms race
is important enough to sacrifice civil liberties and social welfare.
So confusion prevails about the national needs, while the three
major services and the industrial allies jockey for power — the
Air Force tending to support bombers and missilery, the Navy, Polaris
and carriers, the Army, conventional ground forces and invulnerable
nuclear arsenals, and all three feigning unity and support of the
policy of weapons and agglomeration called the "mix".
Strategies are advocated on the basis of power and profit, usually
more so than on the basis of national military needs. In the meantime,
Congressional investigating committees — most notably the House
Un–American Activities Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee
— attempt to curb the little dissent that finds its way into off–beat
magazines. A huge militant anticommunist brigade throws in its support,
patriotically willing to do anything to achieve "total victory"
in the Cold War; the government advocates peaceful confrontation
with international Communism, then utterly pillories and outlaws
the tiny American Communist Party. University professors withdraw
prudently from public issues; the very style of social science writing
becomes more qualified. Needs in housing, education, minority rights,
health care, land redevelopment, hourly wages, all are subordinated
— though a political tear is shed gratuitously — to the primary
objective of the "military and economic strength of the Free
World."

What are the governing policies which supposedly justify all this
human sacrifice and waste? With few exceptions they have reflected
the quandaries and confusion, stagnation and anxiety, of a stalemated
nation in a turbulent world. They have shown a slowness, sometimes
a sheer inability to react to a sequence of new problems.

Of these problems, two of the newest are foremost: the existence
of poised nuclear weapons and the revolutions against the former
colonial powers. In the both areas, the Soviet Union and the various
national communist movements have aggravated internation relations
in inhuman and undesirable ways, but hardly so much as to blame
only communism for the present menacing situation.

Deterrence Policy

The accumulation of nuclear arsenals, the threat of accidental
war, the possibility of limited war becoming illimitable holocaust,
the impossibility of achieving final arms superiority or invulnerability,
the approaching nativity of a cluster of infant atomic powers; all
of these events are tending to undermine traditional concepts of
power relations among nations. War can no longer be considered as
an effective instrument of foreign policy, a means of strengthening
alliances, adjusting the balance of power, maintaining national
sovereignty, or preserving human values. War is no longer simply
a forceful extension of foreign policy; it can obtain no constructive
ends in the modern world. Soviet or American "megatonnage"
is sufficient to destroy all existing social structures as well
as value systems. Missiles have (figuratively) thumbed their nosecones
at national boundaries. But America, like other countries, still
operates by means of national defense and deterrence systems. These
are seen to be useful so long as they are never fully used: unless
we as a national entity can convince Russia that we are willing
to commit the most heinous action in human history, we will be forced
to commit it.

Deterrence advocates, all of them prepared at least to threaten
mass extermination, advance arguments of several kinds. At one pole
are the minority of open partisans of preventive war — who falsely
assume the inevitability of violent conflict and assert the lunatic
efficacy of striking the first blow, assuming that it will be easier
to "recover" after thermonuclear war than to recover now
from the grip of the Cold War. Somewhat more reluctant to advocate
initiating a war, but perhaps more disturbing for their numbers
within the Kennedy Administration, are the many advocates of the
"counterforce" theory of aiming strategic nuclear weapons
at military installations — though this might "save"
more lives than a preventive war, it would require drastic, provocative
and perhaps impossible social change to separate many cities from
weapons sites, it would be impossible to ensure the immunity of
cities after one or two counterforce nuclear "exchanges",
it would generate a perpetual arms race for less vulnerability and
greater weapons power and mobility, it would make outer space a
region subject to militarization, and accelerate the suspicions
and arms build–ups which are incentives to precipitate nuclear action.
Others would support fighting "limited wars" which use
conventional (all but atomic) weapons, backed by deterrents so mighty
that both sides would fear to use them — although underestimating
the implications of numerous new atomic powers on the world stage,
the extreme difficulty of anchoring international order with weapons
of only transient invulnerability, the potential tendency for a
"losing side" to push limited protracted fighting on the
soil of underdeveloped countries. Still other deterrence artists
propose limited, clearly defensive and retaliatory, nuclear capacity,
always potent enough to deter an opponent’s aggressive designs —
the best of deterrence stratagems, but inadequate when it rests
on the equation of an arms "stalemate" with international
stability.

All the deterrence theories suffer in several common ways. They
allow insufficient attention to preserving, extending, and enriching
democratic values, such matters being subordinate rather than governing
in the process of conducting foreign policy. Second, they inadequately
realize the inherent instabilities of the continuing arms race and
balance of fear. Third, they operationally tend to eclipse interest
and action towards disarmament by solidifying economic, political
and even moral investments in continuation of tensions. Fourth,
they offer a disinterested and even patriotic rationale for the
boondoggling, belligerence, and privilege of military and economic
elites. Finally, deterrence stratagems invariably understate or
dismiss the relatedness of various dangers; they inevitably lend
tolerability to the idea of war by neglecting the dynamic interaction
of problems — such as the menace of accidental war, the probable
future tensions surrounding the emergence of ex–colonial nations,
the imminence of several new nations joining the "Nuclear Club,"
the destabilizing potential of technological breakthrough by either
arms race contestant, the threat of Chinese atomic might, the fact
that "recovery" after World War III would involve not
only human survivors but, as well, a huge and fragile social structure
and culture which would be decimated perhaps irreparably by total
war.

Such a harsh critique of what we are doing as a nation by no means
implies that sole blame for the Cold War rests on the United States.
Both sides have behaved irresponsibly — the Russians by an exaggerated
lack of trust, and by much dependence on aggressive military strategists
rather than on proponents of nonviolent conflict and coexistence.
But we do contend, as Americans concerned with the conduct of our
representative institutions, that our government has blamed the
Cold War stalemate on nearly everything but its own hesitations,
its own anachronistic dependence on weapons. To be sure, there is
more to disarmament than wishing for it. There are inadequacies
in international rule–making institutions — which could be corrected.
There are faulty inspection mechanisms — which could be perfected
by disinterested scientists. There is Russian intransigency and
evasiveness — which do not erase the fact that the Soviet Union,
because of a strained economy, an expectant population, fears of
Chinese potential, and interest in the colonial revolution, is increasingly
disposed to real disarmament with real controls. But there is, too,
our own reluctance to face the uncertain world beyond the Cold War,
our own shocking assumption that the risks of the present are fewer
than the risks of a policy re–orientation to disarmament, our own
unwillingness to face the implementation of our rhetorical commitments
to peace and freedom.

Today the world alternatively drifts and plunges towards a terrible
war when vision and change are required, our government pursues
a policy of macabre dead–end dimensions — conditioned, but not
justified, by actions of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, the war which
seems to close will not be fought between the United States and
Russia, not externally between two national entities, but as an
international civil war throughout the unrespected and unprotected
human civitas which spans the world.

The Colonial Revolution

While weapons have accelerated man’s opportunity for self–destruction,
the counter–impulse to life and creation are superbly manifest in
the revolutionary feelings of many Asian, African and Latin American
peoples. Against the individual initiative and aspiration, and social
sense of organicism characteristic of these upsurges, the American
apathy and stalemate stand in embarrassing contrast.

It is difficult today to give human meaning to the welter of facts
that surrounds us. That is why it is especially hard to understand
the facts of "underdevelopment": in India, man and beast
together produced 65 percent of the nation’s economic energy in
a recent year, and of the remaining 35 percent of inanimately produced
power almost three–fourths was obtained by burning dung. But in
the United States, human and animal power together account for only
one percent of the national economic energy — that is what stands
humanly behind the vague term "industrialization". Even
to maintain the misery of Asia today at a constant level will require
a rate of growth tripling the national income and the aggregate
production in Asian countries by the end of the century. For Asians
to have the (unacceptable) 1950 standard of Europeans, less than
$2,000 per year for a family, national production must increase
21–fold by the end the century, and that monstrous feat only to
reach a level that Europeans find intolerable.

What has America done? During the years 1955–57 our total expenditures
in economic aid were equal to one–tenth of one percent of our total
Gross National Product. Prior to that time it was less; since then
it has been a fraction higher. Immediate social and economic development
is needed — we have helped little, seeming to prefer to create
a growing gap between "have" and "have not"
rather than to usher in social revolutions which would threaten
our investors and out military alliances. The new nations want to
avoid power entanglements that will open their countries to foreign
domination — and we have often demanded loyalty oaths. They do
not see the relevence of uncontrolled free enterprise in societies
without accumulated capital and a significant middle class — and
we have looked calumniously on those who would not try "our
way". They seek empathy — and we have sided with the old colonialists,
who now are trying to take credit for "giving" all the
freedom that has been wrested from them, or we "empathize"
when pressure absolutely demands it.

With rare variation, American foreign policy in the Fifties was
guided by a concern for foreign investment and a negative anti–communist
political stance linked to a series of military alliances, both
undergirded by military threat. We participated unilaterally —
usually through the Central Intelligence Agency — in revolutions
against governments in Laos, Guatemala, Cuba, Egypt, Iran. We permitted
economic investment to decisively affect our foreign policy: fruit
in Cuba, oil in the Middle East, diamonds and gold in South Africa
(with whom we trade more than with any African nation). More exactly:
America’s "foreign market" in the late Fifties, including
exports of goods and services plus overseas sales by American firms,
averaged about $60 billion annually. This represented twice the
investment of 1950, and it is predicted that the same rates of increase
will continue. The reason is obvious: Fortune said in 1958, "foreign
earnings will be more than double in four years, more than twice
the probable gain in domestic profits". These investments are
concentrated primarily in the Middle East and Latin America, neither
region being an impressive candidate for the long–run stability,
political caution, and lower–class tolerance that American investors
typically demand.

Our pugnacious anti–communism and protection of interests has led
us to an alliance inappropriately called the "Free World".
It included four major parliamentary democracies: ourselves, Canada,
Great Britain, and India. It also has included through the years
Batista, Franco, Verwoerd, Salazar, De Gaulle, Boun Oum, Ngo Diem,
Chiang Kai Shek, Trujillo, the Somozas, Saud, Ydigoras — all of
these non–democrats separating us deeply from the colonial revolutions.

Since the Kennedy administration began, the American government
seems to have initiated policy changes in the colonial and underdeveloped
areas. It accepted "neutralism" as a tolerable principle;
it sided more than once with the Angolans in the United Nations;
it invited Souvanna Phouma to return to Laos after having overthrown
his neutralist government there; it implemented the Alliance for
Progress that President Eisenhower proposed when Latin America appeared
on the verge of socialist revolutions; it made derogatory statements
about the Trujillos; it cautiously suggested that a democratic socialist
government in British Guiana might be necessary to support; in inaugural
oratory, it suggested that a moral imperative was involved in sharing
the world’s resources with those who have been previously dominated.
These were hardly sufficient to heal the scars of past activity
and present associations, but nevertheless they were motions away
from the Fifties. But quite unexpectedly, the President ordered
the Cuban invations, and while the American press railed about how
we had been "shamed" and defied by that "monster
Castro," the colonial peoples of the world wondered whether
our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways
(we had never supported Castro, even on the eve of his taking power,
and had announced early that "the conduct of the Castro government
toward foreign private enterprise in Cuba" would be a main
State Department concern). Any heralded changes in our foreign policy
are now further suspect in the wake of the Punta Del Este foreign
minister’s conference where the five countries representing most
of Latin America refused to cooperate in our plans to further "isolate"
the Castro government.

Ever since the colonial revolution began, American policy makers
have reacted to new problems with old "gunboat" remedies,
often thinly disguised. The feeble but desirable efforts of the
Kennedy administration to be more flexible are coming perhaps too
late, and are of too little significance to really change the historical
thrust of our policies. The hunger problem is increasing rapidly
mostly as a result of the worldwide population explosion that cancels
out the meager triumphs gained so far over starvation. The threat
of population to economic growth is simply documented: in 1960–70
population in Africa south of the Sahara will increase 14 percent;
in South Asia and the Far East by 22 percent; in North Africa 26
percent; in the Middle East by 27 percent; in Latin America 29 percent.
Population explosion, no matter how devastating, is neutral. But
how long will it take to create a relation of thrust between America
and the newly–developing societies? How long to change our policies?
And what length of time do we have?

The world is in transformation. But America is not. It can race
to industrialize the world, tolerating occasional authoritarianisms,
socialisms, neutralisms along the way — or it can slow the pace
of the inevitable and default to the eager and self–interested Soviets
and, much more importantly, to mankind itself. Only mystics would
guess we have opted thoroughly for the first. Consider what our
people think of this, the most urgent issue on the human agenda.
Fed by a bellicose press, manipulated by economic and political
opponents of change, drifting in their own history, they grumble
about "the foreign aid waste", or about "that beatnik
down in Cuba", or how "things will get us by" . .
. thinking confidently, albeit in the usual bewilderment, that Americans
can go right on like always, five percent of mankind producing forty
percent of its goods.

Anti–Communism

An unreasoning anti–communism has become a major social problem
for those who want to construct a more democratic America. McCarthyism
and other forms of exaggerated and conservative anti–communism seriously
weaken democratic institutions and spawn movements contrary to the
interests of basic freedoms and peace. In such an atmosphere even
the most intelligent of Americans fear to join political organizations,
sign petitions, speak out on serious issues. Militaristic policies
are easily "sold" to a public fearful of a democratic
enemy. Political debate is restricted, thought is standardized,
action is inhibited by the demands of "unity" and "oneness"
in the face of the declared danger. Even many liberals and socialists
share static and repititious participation in the anti–communist
crusade and often discourage tentative, inquiring discussion about
"the Russian question" within their ranks — often by
employing "stalinist", "stalinoid", trotskyite"
and other epithets in an oversimplifying way to discredit opposition.

Thus much of the American anti–communism takes on the characteristics
of paranoia. Not only does it lead to the perversion of democracy
and to the political stagnation of a warfare society, but it also
has the unintended consequence of preventing an honest and effective
approach to the issues. Such an approach would require public analysis
and debate of world politics. But almost nowhere in politics is
such a rational analysis possible to make.

It would seem reasonable to expect that in America the basic issues
of the Cold War should be rationally and fully debated, between
persons of every opinion — on television, on platforms and through
other media. It would seem, too, that there should be a way for
the person or an organization to oppose communism without contributing
to the common fear of associations and public actions. But these
things do not happen; instead, there is finger–pointing and comical
debate about the most serious of issues. This trend of events on
the domestic scene, towards greater irrationality on major questions,
moves us to greater concern than does the "internal threat"
of domestic communism. Democracy, we are convinced, requires every
effort to set in peaceful opposition the basic viewpoints of the
day; only by conscious, determined, though difficult, efforts in
this direction will the issue of communism be met appropriately.

Communism and Foreign Policy

As democrats we are in basic opposition to the communist system.
The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total suppression of
organized opposition, as well as on a vision of the future in the
name of which much human life has been sacrificed, and numerous
small and large denials of human dignity rationalized. The Communist
Party has equated falsely the "triumph of true socialism"
with centralized bureaucracy. The Soviet state lacks independent
labor organizations and other liberties we consider basic. And despite
certain reforms, the system remains almost totally divorced from
the image officially promulgated by the Party. Communist parties
throughout the rest of the world are generally undemocratic in internal
structure and mode of action. Moreover, in most cases they subordinate
radical programs to requirements of Soviet foreign policy. The communist
movement has failed, in every sense, to achieve its stated intentions
of leading a worldwide movement for human emancipation.

But present trends in American anti–communism are not sufficient
for the creation of appropriate policies with which to relate to
and counter communist movements in the world. In no instance is
this better illustrated than in our basic national policy–making
assumption that the Soviet Union is inherently expansionist and
aggressive, prepared to dominate the rest of the world by military
means. On this assumption rests the monstrous American structure
of military "preparedness"; because of it we sacrifice
values and social programs to the alleged needs of military power.

But the assumption itself is certainly open to question and debate.
To be sure, the Soviet state has used force and the threat of force
to promote or defend its perceived national interests. But the typical
American response has been to equate the use of force — which in
many cases might be dispassionately interpreted as a conservative,
albeit brutal, action — with the initiation of a worldwide military
onslaught. In addition, the Russian–Chinese conflicts and the emergency
!! throughout the communist movement call for a re–evaluation of
any monolithic interpretations. And the apparent Soviet disinterest
in building a first–strike arsenal of weapons challenges the weight
given to protection against surprise attack in formulations of American
policy toward the Soviets.

Almost without regard to one’s conception of the dynamics of Soviet
society and foreign policy, it is evident that the American military
response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy
than communism. Moreover, our prevailing policies make difficult
the encouragement of skepticism, anti–war or pro–democratic attitudes
in the communist systems. America has done a great deal to foment
the easier, opposite tendency in Russia: suspicion, suppression,
and stiff military resistance. We have established a system of military
alliances which of even dubious deterrence value. It is reasonable
of suggest the "Berlin" and "Laos" have been
earth–shaking situations partly because rival systems of deterrence
make impossible the withdrawal of threats. The "status quo"
is not cemented by mutual threat but by mutual fear of receeding
from pugnacity — since the latter course would undermine the "credibility"
of our deterring system. Simultaneously, while billions in military
aid were propping up right–wing Laotian, Formosan, Iranian and other
regimes, American leadership never developed a purely political
policy for offering concrete alternatives to either communism or
the status quo for colonial revolutions. The results have been:
fulfillment of the communist belief that capitalism is stagnant,
its only defense being dangerous military adventurism; destabilizing
incidents in numerous developing countries; an image of America
allied with corrupt oligarchies counterposed to the Russian–Chinese
image of rapid, though brutal, economic development. Again and again,
America mistakes the static area of defense, rather than the dynamic
area of development, as the master need of two–thirds of mankind.

Our paranoia about the Soviet Union has made us incapable of achieving
agreements absolutely necessary for disarmament and the preservation
of peace. We are hardly able to see the possibility that the Soviet
Union, though not "peace loving", may be seriously interested
in disarmament.

Infinite possibilities for both tragedy and progress lie before
us. On the one hand, we can continue to be afraid, and out of fear
commit suicide. On the other hand, we can develop a fresh and creative
approach to world problems which will help to create democracy at
home and establish conditions for its growth elsewhere in the world.

Literacy: One of every four "nonwhites" is functionally
illiterate; half do not complete elementary school; one in five
finishes high school or better. But one in twenty whites is functionally
illiterate; four of five finish elementary school; half go through
high school or better.

Salary: In 1959 a "nonwhite" worker could expect to
average $2,844 annually; a "nonwhite" family, including
a college–educated father, could expect to make $5,654 collectively.
But a white worker could expect to make $4,487 if he worked alone;
with a college degree and a family of helpers he could expect $7,373.
The approximate Negro–white wage ratio has remained nearly level
for generations, with the exception of the World War II employment
"boom" which opened many better jobs to exploited groups.

Work: More than half of all "nonwhites" work at laboring
or service jobs, including one–fourth of those with college degrees;
one in 20 works in a professional or managerial capacity. Fewer
than one in five of all whites are laboring or service workers,
including one in every 100 of the college–educated; one in four
is in professional or managerial work.

Unemployment: Within the 1960 labor force of approximately 72
million, one of every 10 "nonwhites" was unemployed. Only
one of every 20 whites suffered that condition.

Housing: The census classifies 57 percent of all "nonwhite"
houses substandard, but only 27 percent of white–owned units so
exist.

Education: More than fifty percent of America’s "nonwhite"
high school students never graduate. The vocational and professional
spread of curriculum categories offered "nonwhites" is
16 as opposed to the 41 occupations offered to the white student.
Furthermore, in spite of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, 80 percent
of all "nonwhites" educated actually, or virtually, are
educated under segregated conditions. And only one of 20 "nonwhite"
students goes to college as opposed to the 1:10 ratio for white
students.

Voting: While the white community is registered above two–thirds
of its potential, the "nonwhite" population is registered
below one–third of its capacity (with even greater distortion in
areas of the Deep South).

Even against this background, some will say progress is being made.
The facts bely it, however, unless it is assumed that America has
another century to deal with its racial inequalities. Others, more
pompous, will blame the situation on "those people’s inability
to pick themselves up", not understanding the automatic way
in which such a system can frustrate reform efforts and diminish
the aspirations of the oppressed. The one–party system in the South,
attached to the Dixiecrat–Republican complex nationally, cuts off
the Negro’s independent powers as a citizen. Discrimination in employment,
along with labor’s accomodation to the "lily–white" hiring
practises, guarantees the lowest slot in the economic order to the
"nonwhite." North or South, these oppressed are conditioned
by their inheritance and their surroundings to expect more of the
same: in housing, schools, recreation, travel, all their potential
is circumscribed, thwarted and often extinguished. Automation grinds
up job opportunities, and ineffective or non–existent retraining
programs make the already–handicapped "nonwhite" even
less equipped to participate in "technological progress."

Horatio Alger Americans typically believe that the "nonwhites"
are being "accepted" and "rising" gradually.
They see more Negroes on television and so assume that Negroes are
"better off". They hear the President talking about Negroes
and so assume they are politically represented. They are aware of
black peoples in the United Nations and so assume that the world
is generally moving toward integration. They don’t drive through
the South, or through the slum areas of the big cities, so they
assume that squalor and naked exploitation are disappearing. They
express generalities about "time and gradualism" to hide
the fact that they don’t know what is happening.

The advancement of the Negro and other "nonwhites" in
America has not been altogether by means of the crusades of liberalism,
but rather through unavoidable changes in social structure. The
economic pressures of World War II opened new jobs, new mobility,
new insights to Southern Negroes, who then began great migrations
from the South to the bigger urban areas of the North where their
absolute wage was greater, though unchanged in relation to the white
man of the same stratum. More important than the World War II openings
was the colonial revolution. The world–wide upsurge of dark peoples
against white colonial domination stirred the separation and created
an urgancy among American Negroes, while simultaneously it threatened
the power structure of the United States enough to produce concessions
to the Negro. Produced by outer pressure from the newly–moving peoples
rather than by the internal conscience of the Federal government,
the gains were keyed to improving the American "image"
more than to reconstructing the society that prospered on top of
its minorities. Thus the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954,
theoretically desegregating Southern schools, was more a proclamation
than a harbinger of social change — and is reflected as such in
the fraction of Southern school districts which have desegregated,
with Federal officials doing little to spur the process.

It has been said that the Kennedy administration did more in two
years than the Eisenhower administration did in eight. Of this there
can be no doubt. But it is analogous to comparing whispers to silence
when positively stentorian tones are demanded. President Kennedy
lept ahead of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference
to the racial problem; Eisenhower did not utter a meaningful public
statement until his last month in office when he mentioned the "blemish"
of bigotry.

To avoid conflict with the Dixiecrat–Republican alliance, President
Kennedy has developed a civil rights philosophy of "enforcement,
not enactment", implying that existing statuatory tools are
sufficient to change the lot of the Negro. So far he has employed
executive power usefully to appoint Negroes to various offices,
and seems interested in seeing the Southern Negro registered to
vote. On the other hand, he has appointed at least four segregationist
judges in areas where voter registration is a desperate need. Only
two civil rights bills, one to abolish the poll tax in five states
and another to prevent unfair use of literacy tests in registration,
have been proposed — the President giving active support to neither.
But even this legislation, lethargically supported, then defeated,
was intended to extend only to Federal elections. More important,
the Kennedy interest in voter registration has not been supplemented
with interest in giving the Southern Negro the economic protection
that only trade unions can provide. It seems evident that the President
is attempting to win the Negro permanently to the Democratic Party
without basically disturbing the reactionary one–party oligarchy
in the South. Moreover, the administration is decidedly "cool"
(a phrase of Robert Kennedy’s) toward mass nonviolent movements
in the South, though by the support of racist Dixiecrats the Administration
makes impossible gradual action through conventional channels. The
Federal Bureau of Investigation in the South is composed of Southerners
and their intervention in situations of racial tension is always
after the incident, not before. Kennedy has refused to "enforce"
the legal prerogative to keep Federal marshals active in Southern
areas before, during and after any "situations" (this
would invite Negroes to exercise their rights and it would infuriate
the Southerners in Congress because of its "insulting"
features).

While corrupt politicians, together with business interests happy
with the absence of organized labor in Southern states and with
the $50 billion in profits that results from paying the Negro half
a "white wage", stymie and slow fundamental progress,
it remains to be appreciated that the ultimate wages of discrimination
are paid by individuals and not by the state. Indeed the other sides
of the economic, political and sociological coins of racism represent
their more profound implications in the private lives, liberties
and pursuits of happiness of the citizen. While hungry nonwhites
the world around assume rightful dominance, the majority of Americans
fight to keep integrated housing out of the suburbs. While a fully
interracial world becomes a biological probability, most Americans
persist in opposing marriage between the races. While cultures generally
interpenetrate, white America is ignorant still of nonwhite America
— and perhaps glad of it. The white lives almost completely within
his immediate, close–up world where things are tolerable, there
are no Negroes except on the bus corner going to and from work,
and where it is important that daughter marry right. White, like
might, makes right in America today. Not knowing the "nonwhite",
however, the white knows something less than himself. Not comfortable
around "different people", he reclines in whiteness instead
of preparing for diversity. Refusing to yield objective social freedoms
to the "nonwhite", the white loses his personal subjective
freedom by turning away "from all these damn causes."

White American ethnocentrism at home and abroad reflect most sharply
the self–deprivation suffered by the majority of our country which
effectively makes it an isolated minority in the world community
of culture and fellowship. The awe inspired by the pervasiveness
of racism in American life is only matched by the marvel of its
historical span in American traditions. The national heritage of
racial discrimination via slavery has been a part of America since
Christopher Columbus’ advent on the new continent. As such, racism
not only antedates the Republic and the thirteen Colonies, but even
the use of the English language in this hemisphere. And it is well
that we keep this as a background when trying to understand why
racism stands as such a steadfast pillar in the culture and custom
of the country. Racial–xenophobia is reflected in the admission
of various racial stocks to the country. From the nineteenth century
Oriental Exclusion Acts to the most recent up–dating of the Walter–McCarren
Immigration Acts the nation has shown a continuous contemptuous
regard for "nonwhites." More recently, the tragedies of
Hiroshima and Korematsu, and our cooperation with Western Europe
in the United Nations add treatment to the thoroughness of racist
overtones in national life.

But the right to refuse service to anyone is no longer reserved
to the Americans. The minority groups, internationally, are changing
place.

What is Needed?

How to end the Cold War? How to increase democracy in America?
These are the decisive issues confronting liberal and socialist
forces today. To us, the issues are intimately related, the struggle
for one invariably being a struggle for the other. What policy and
structural alternatives are needed to obtain these ends?

Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and
arms control as the national defense goal. The strategy of mutual
threat can only temporarily prevent thermonuclear war, and it cannot
but erode democratic institutions here while consolidating oppressive
institutions in the Soviet Union. Yet American leadership, while
giving rhetorical due to the ideal of disarmament, persists in accepting
mixed deterrence as its policy formula: under Kennedy we have seen
first–strike and second–strike weapons, counter–military and counter–population
inventions, tactical atomic weapons and guerilla warriors, etc.
The convenient rationalization that our weapons potpourri will confuse
the enemy into fear of misbehaving is absurd and threatening. Our
own intentions, once clearly retaliatory, are now ambiguous since
the President has indicated we might in certain circumstances be
the first to use nuclear weapons. We can expect that Russia will
become more anxious herself, and perhaps even prepare to "preempt"
us, and we (expecting the worst from the Russians) will nervously
consider "preemption" ourselves. The symmetry of threat
and counter–threat lead not to stability but to the edge of hell.

It is necessary that America make disarmament, not nuclear deterrence,
"credible" to the Soviets and to the world. That is, disarmament
should be continually avowed as a national goal; concrete plans
should be presented at conference tables; real machinery for a disarming
and disarmed world — national and international — should be created
while the disarming process itself goes on. The long–standing idea
of unilateral initiative should be implemented as a basic feature
of American disarmament strategy: initiatives that are graduated
in their — potential, accompanied by invitations to reciprocate
when done regardless of reciprocation, openly — significant period
of future time. Their — should not be to strip America of weapon,
— produce a climate in which disarmament can be — with less
mutual hostility and threat. They might include: a unilateral nuclear
test moratorium, withdrawal of several bases near the Soviet Union,
proposals to experiment in disarmament by stabilization of zone
of controversy; cessation of all apparent first–strike preparations,
such as the development of 41 Polaris by 1963 while naval theorists
state that about 45 constitutes a provocative force; inviting a
special United Nations agency to observe and inspect the launchings
of all American flights into outer space; and numerous others.

There is no simple formula for the content of an actual disarmament
treaty. It should be phased: perhaps on a region–by–region basis,
the conventional weapons first. It should be conclusive, not open–ended,
in its projection. It should be controlled: national inspection
systems are adequate at first, but should be soon replaced by international
devices and teams. It should be more than denuding: world or at
least regional enforcement agencies, an international civil service
and inspection service, and other supranational groups must come
into reality under the United Nations.

Disarmament should be see as a political issue, not a technical
problem. Should this year’s Geneva negotiations have resulted (by
magic) in a disarmament agreement, the United States Senate would
have refused to ratify it, a domestic depression would have begun
instantly, and every fiber of American life would be wrenched drastically:
these are indications not only of our unpreparedness for disarmament,
but also that disarmament is not "just another policy shift."
Disarmament means a deliberate shift in most of our domestic and
foreign policy.

It will involve major changes in economic direction. Government
intervention in new areas, government regulation of certain industrial
price and investment practices to prevent inflation, full use of
national productive capacities, and employment for every person
in a dramatically expanding economy all are to be expected as the
"price" of peace.

It will involve the simultaneous creation of international rulemaking
and enforcement machinery beginning under the United Nations, and
the gradual transfer of sovereignties — such as national armies
and national determination of "international" law — to
such machinery.

It will involve the initiation of an explicitly political —
as opposed to military — foreign policy on the part of the two
major superstates. Neither has formulated the political terms in
which they would conduct their behavior in a disarming or disarmed
world. Neither dares to disarm until such an understanding is reached.

A crucial feature of this political understanding must be the
acceptance of status quo possessions. According to the universality
principle all present national entities — including the Vietnams,
the Koreans, the Chinas, and the Germanys — should be members of
the United Nations as sovereign, no matter how desirable, states.

Russia cannot be expected to negotiate disarmament treaties for
the Chinese. We should not feed Chinese fanaticism with our encirclement
but Chinese stomachs with the aim of making war contrary to Chinese
policy interests. Every day that we support anti–communist tyrants
but refuse to even allow the Chinese Communists representation in
the United Nations marks a greater separation of our ideals and
our actions, and it makes more likely bitter future relations with
the Chinese.

Second, we should recognize that an authoritarian Germany’s insistence
on reunification, while knowing the impossibility of achieving it
with peaceful means, could only generate increasing frustrations
among the population and nationalist sentiments which frighten its
Eastern neighbors who have historical reasons to suspect Germanic
intentions. President Kennedy himself told the editor of Izvestia
that he fears an independent Germany with nuclear arms, but American
policies have not demonstrated cognisance of the fact that Chancellor
Adenauer too, is interested in continued East–West tensions over
the Germany and Berlin problems and nuclear arms precisely because
this is the rationale for extending his domestic power and his influence
upon the NATO–Common Market alliance.

A world war over Berlin would be absurd. Anyone concurring with
such a proposition should demand that the West cease its contradictory
advocacy of "reunification of Germany through free elections"
and "a rearmed Germany in NATO". It is a dangerous illusion
to assume that Russia will hand over East Germany to a rearmed re–united
Germany which will enter the Western camp, although this Germany
might have a Social Democratic majority which could prevent a reassertion
of German nationalism. We have to recognize that the cold war and
the incorporation of Germany into the two power blocs was a decision
of both Moscow and Washington, of both Adenauer and Ulbricht. The
immediate responsibility for the Berlin wall is Ulbricht’s. But
it had to be expected that a regime which was bad enough to make
people flee is also bad enough to prevent them from fleeing. The
inhumanity of the Berlin wall is an ironic symbol of the irrationality
of the cold war, which keeps Adenauer and Ulbricht in power. A reduction
of the tension over Berlin, if by internationalization or by recognition
of the status quo and reducing provocations, is a necessary but
equally temporary measure which could not ultimately reduce the
basic cold war tension to which Berlin owes its precarious situation.
The Berlin problem cannot be solved without reducing tensions in
Europe, possibly by a bilateral military disengagement and creating
a neutralized buffer zone. Even if Washington and Moscow were in
favor disengagement, both Adenauer and Ulbricht would never agree
to it because cold war keeps their parties in power.

Until their regimes’ departure from the scene of history, the Berlin
status quo will have to be maintained while minimizing the tensions
necessarily arising from it. Russia cannot expect the United States
to tolerate its capture by the Ulbricht regime, but neither can
America expect to be in a position to indefinitely use Berlin as
a fortress within the communist world. As a fair and bilateral disengagement
in Central Europe seems to be impossible for the time being, a mutual
recognition of the Berlin status quo, that is, of West Berlin’s
and East Germany’s security, is needed. And it seems to be possible,
although the totalitarian regime of East Germany and the authoritarian
leadership of West Germany until now succeeded in frustrating all
attempts to minimize the dangerous tensions of cold war.

The strategy of securing the status quo of the two power blocs
until it is possible to depolarize the world by creating neutralist
regions in all trouble zones seems to be the only way to guarantee
peace at this time.

Experiments in disengagement and demilitarization must be conducted
as part of the total disarming process. These "disarmament
experiments" can be of several kinds, so long as they are consistent
with the principles of containing the arms race and isolating specific
sectors of the world from the Cold War power–play. First, it is
imperative that no more nations be supplied with, or locally produce,
nuclear weapons. A 1959 report of the National Academy of Arts and
Sciences predicted that 19 nations would be so armed in the near
future. Should this prediction be fulfilled, the prospects of war
would be unimaginably expanded. For this reason the United States,
Great Britain and the Soviet Union should band against France (which
wants its own independent deterrent) and seek, through United Nations
or other machinery, the effective prevention of the spread of atomic
weapons. This would involve not only declarations of "denuclearization"
in whole areas of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe, but would
attempt to create inspection machinery to guarantee the peaceful
use of atomic energy.

Second, the United States should reconsider its increasingly outmoded
European defense framework, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Since its creation in 1949, NATO has assumed increased strength
in overall determination of Western military policy, but has become
less and less relevant to its original purpose, which was the defense
of Central Europe. To be sure, after the Czech coup of 1948, it
might have appeared that the Soviet Union was on the verge of a
full–scale assault on Europe. But that onslaught has not materialized,
not so much because of NATO’s existence but because of the general
unimportance of much of Central Europe to the Soviets. Today, when
even American–based ICBMs could smash Russia minutes after an invasion
of Europe, when the Soviets have no reason to embark on such an
invasion, and when "thaw sectors" are desperately needed
to brake the arms race, one of at least threatening but most promising
courses for American would be toward the gradual diminishment of
the NATO forces, coupled with the negotiated "disengagement"
of parts of Central Europe.

It is especially crucial that this be done while America is entering
into favorable trade relations with the European Economic Community:
such a gesture, combining economic ambition with less dependence
on the military, would demonstrate the kind of competitive "co–existence"
America intends to conduct with the communist–bloc nations. If the
disengaged states were the two Germanies, Poland and Czechoslovakia,
several other benefits would accrue. First, the United States would
be breaking with the lip–service commitment to "liberation"
of Eastern Europe which has contributed so much to Russian fears
and intransigence, while doing too little about actual liberation.
But the end of "liberation" as a proposed policy would
not signal the end of American concern for the oppressed in East
Europe. On the contrary, disengagement would be a real, rather than
a rhetorical, effort to ease military tensions, thus undermining
the Russian argument for tighter controls in East Europe based on
the "menace of capitalist encirclement". This policy,
geared to the needs of democratic elements in the satellites, would
develop a real bridge between East and West across the two most
pro–Western Russian satellites. The Russians in the past have indicated
some interest in such a plan, including the demilitarization of
the Warsaw pact countries. Their interest should be publicly tested.
If disengagement could be achieved, a major zone could be removed
from the Cold War, the German problem would be materially diminished,
and the need for NATO would diminish, and attitudes favorable to
disarming would be generated.

Needless to say, those proposals are much different than what is
currently being practised and praised. American military strategists
are slowly acceeding to the NATO demand for an independent deterrent,
based on the fear that America might not defend Europe from military
attack. These tendencies strike just the opposite chords in Russia
than those which would be struck by disengagement themes: the chords
of military alertness, based on the fact that NATO (bulwarked by
the German Wehrmacht) is preparing to attack Eastern Europe or the
Soviet Union. Thus the alarm which underlies the NATO proposal for
an independent deterrent is likely itself to bring into existence
the very Russian posture that was the original cause of fear. Armaments
spiral and belligerence will carry the day, not disengagement and
negotiation.

The Industrialization of the World

Many Americans are prone to think of the industrialization of the
newlydeveloped countries as a modern form of American noblesse,
undertaken sacrificially for the benefit of others. On the contrary,
the task of world industrialization, of eliminating the disparity
between have and have–not nations, is as important as any issue
facing America. The colonial revolution signals the end of an era
for the old Western powers and a time of new beginnings for most
of the people of the earth. In the course of these upheavals, many
problems will emerge: American policies must be revised or accelerated
in several ways.

The United States’ principal goal should be creating a world
where hunger, poverty, disease, ignorance, violence, and exploitation
are replaced as central features by abundance, reason, love, and
international cooperation. To many this will seem the product of
juvenile hallucination: but we insist it is a more realistic goal
than is a world of nuclear stalemate. Some will say this is a hope
beyond all bounds: but is far better to us to have positive vision
than a "hard headed" resignation. Some will sympathize,
but claim it is impossible: if so, then, we, not Fate, are the responsible
ones, for we have the means at our disposal. We should not give
up the attempt for fear of failure.

We should undertake here and now a fifty–year effort to prepare
for all nations the conditions of industrialization. Even with far
more capital and skill than we now import to emerging areas, serious
prophets expect that two generations will pass before accelerating
industrialism is a worldwide act. The needs are numerous: every
nation must build an adequate intrastructure (transportation, communication,
land resources, waterways) for future industrial growth; there must
be industries suited to the rapid development of differing raw materials
and other resources; education must begin on a continuing basis
for everyone in the society, especially including engineering and
technical training; technical assistance from outside sources must
be adequate to meet present and long–term needs; atomic power plants
must spring up to make electrical energy available. With America’s
idle productive capacity, it is possible to begin this process immediately
without changing our military allocations. This might catalyze a
"peace race" since it would demand a response of such
magnitude from the Soviet Union that arms spending and "coexistence"
spending would become strenuous, perhaps impossible, for the Soviets
to carry on simultaneously.

We should not depend significantly on private enterprise to do
the job. Many important projects will not be profitable enough to
entice the investment of private capital. The total amount required
is far beyond the resources of corporate and philanthropic concerns.
The new nations are suspicious, legitimately, of foreign enterprises
dominating their national life. World industrialization is too huge
an undertaking to be formulated or carried out by private interests.
Foreign economic assistance is a national problem, requiring long
range planning, integration with other domestic and foreign policies,
and considerable public debate and analysis. Therefore the Federal
government should have primary responsibility in this area.

We should not lock the development process into the Cold War:
we should view it as a way of ending that conflict. When President
Kennedy declared that we must aid those who need aid because it
is right, he was unimpeachably correct — now principle must become
practice. We should reverse the trend of aiding corrupt anti–communist
regimes. To support dictators like Diem while trying to destroy
ones like Castro will only enforce international cynicism about
American "principle", and is bound to lead to even more
authoritarian revolutions, especially in Latin America where we
did not even consider foreign aid until Castro had challenged the
status quo. We should end the distinction between communist hunger
and anti–communist hunger. To feed only anticommunists is to directly
fatten men like Boun Oum, to incur the wrath of real democrats,
and to distort our own sense of human values. We must cease seeing
development in terms of communism and capitalism. To fight communism
by capitalism in the newly–developing areas is to fundamentally
misunderstand the international hatred of imperialism and colonialism
and to confuse and needs of 19th century industrial America with
those of contemporary nations.
Quite fortunately, we are edging away from the Dullesian "either–or"
foreign policy ultimatum towards an uneasy acceptance of neutralism
and nonalignment. If we really desire the end of the Cold War, we
should now welcome nonalignment — that is, the creation of whole
blocs of nations concerned with growth and with independently trying
to break out of the Cold War apparatus.
Finally, while seeking disarmament as the genuine deterrent, we
should shift from financial support of military regimes to support
of national development. Real security cannot be gained by propping
up military defenses, but only through the hastening of political
stability, economic growth, greater social welfare, improved education.
Military aid is temporary in nature, a "shoring up" measure
that only postpones crisis. In addition, it tends to divert the
allocations of the nation being defended to supplementary military
spending (Pakistan’s budget is 70% oriented to defense measures).
Sometimes it actually creates crisis situations, as in Latin America
where we have contributed to the growth of national armies which
are opposed generally to sweeping democratization. Finally, if we
are really generous, it is harder for corrupt governments to exploit
unfairly economic aid — especially if it is to plentiful that rulers
cannot blame the absence of real reforms on anything but their own
power lusts.

America should show its commitment to democratic institutions
not by withdrawing support from undemocratic regimes, but by making
domestic democracy exemplary. Worldwide amusement, cynicism and
hatred toward the United States as a democracy is not simply a communist
propaganda trick, but an objectively justifiable phenomenon. If
respect for democracy is to be international, then the significance
of democracy must emanate from America shores, not from the "soft
sell" of the United States Information Agency.

America should agree that public utilities, railroads, mines,
and plantations, and other basic economic institutions should be
in the control of national, not foreign, agencies. The destiny of
any country should be determined by its nationals, not by outsiders
with economic interests within. We should encourage our investors
to turn over their foreign holdings (or at least 50% of the stock)
to the national governments of the countries involved.

Foreign aid should be given through international agencies,
primarily the United Nations. The need is to eliminate political
overtones, to the extent possible, from economic development. The
use of international agencies, with interests transcending those
of American or Russian self–interest, is the feasible means of working
on sound development. Second, internationalization will allow more
long–range planning, integrate development plans adjacent countries
and regions may have, and eliminate the duplication built into national
systems of foreign aid. Third, it would justify more strictness
of supervision than is now the case with American foreign aid efforts,
but with far less chance of suspicion on the part of the developing
countries. Fourth, the humiliating "hand–out" effect would
be replaced by the joint participation of all nations in the general
development of the earth’s resources and industrial capacities.
Fifth, it would eliminate national tensions, e.g. between Japan
and some Southeast Asian areas, which now impair aid programs by
"disguising" nationalities in the common pooling of funds.
Sixth, it would make easier the task of stabilizing the world market
prices of basic commodities, alleviating the enormous threat that
decline in prices of commodity exports might cancel out the gains
from foreign aid in the new nations. Seventh, it would improve the
possibilities of non–exploitative development, especially in creating
"soft–credit" rotating–fund agencies which would not require
immediate progress or financial return. Finally, it would enhance
the importance of the United Nations itself, as the disarming process
would enhance the UN as a rule–enforcement agency.

Democratic theory must confront the problems inherent in social
revolutions. For Americans concerned with the development of democratic
societies, the anti–colonial movements and revolutions in the emerging
nations pose serious problems. We need to face these problems with
humility: after 180 years of constitutional government we are still
striving for democracy in our own society. We must acknowledge that
democracy and freedom do not magically occur, but have roots in
historical experience; they cannot always be demanded for any society
at any time, but must be nurtured and facilitated. We must avoid
the arbitrary projection of Anglo–Saxon democratic forms onto different
cultures. Instead of democratic capitalism we should anticipate
more or less authoritarian variants of socialism and collectivism
in many emergent societies.
But we do not abandon our critical faculties. Insofar as these
regimes represent a genuine realization of national independence,
and are engaged in constructing social systems which allow for personal
meaning and purpose where exploitation once was, economic systems
which work for the people where once they oppressed them, and political
systems which allow for the organization and expression of minority
opinion and dissent, we recognize their revolutionary and positive
character. Americans can contribute to the growth of democracy in
such societies not by moralizing, nor by indiscriminate prejudgment,
but by retaining a critical identification with these nations, and
by helping them to avoid external threats to their independence.
Together with students and radicals in these nations we need to
develop a reasonable theory of democracy which is concretely applicable
to the cultures and conditions of hungry people.

Towards American Democracy

Every effort to end the Cold War and expand the process of world
industrialization is an effort hostile to people and institutions
whose interests lie in perpetuation of the East–West military threat
and the postponement of change in the "have not" nations
of the world. Every such effort, too, is bound to establish greater
democracy in America. The major goals of a domestic effort would
be:

America must abolish its political party stalemate. Two genuine
parties, centered around issues and essential values, demanding
allegiance to party principles shall supplant the current system
of organized stalemate which is seriously inadequate to a world
in flux. It has long been argued that the very overlapping of American
parties guarantees that issues will be considered responsibly, that
progress will be gradual instead of intemperate, and that therefore
America will remain stable instead of torn by class strife. On the
contrary: the enormous party overlap itself confuses issues and
makes responsible presentation of choice to the electorate impossible,
that guarantees Congressional listlessness and the drift of power
to military and economic bureaucracies, that directs attention away
from the more fundamental causes of social stability, such as a
huge middle class, Keynesian economic techniques and Madison Avenue
advertising. The ideals of political democracy, then, the imperative
need for flexible decision–making apparatus makes a real two–party
system an immediate social necessity. What is desirable is sufficient
party disagreement to dramatize major issues, yet sufficient party
overlap to guarantee stable transitions from administration to administration.
Every time the President criticizes a recalcitrant Congress, we
must ask that he no longer tolerate the Southern conservatives in
the Democratic Party. Every time in liberal representative complains
that "we can’t expect everything at once" we must ask
if we received much of anything from Congress in the last generation.
Every time he refers to "circumstances beyond control"
we must ask why he fraternizes with racist scoundrels. Every time
he speaks of the "unpleasantness of personal and party fighting"
we should insist that pleasantry with Dixiecrats is inexcusable
when the dark peoples of the world call for American support.

Mechanisms of voluntary association must be created through
which political information can be imparted and political participation
encouraged. Political parties, even if realigned, would not provide
adequate outlets for popular involvement. Institutions should be
created that engage people with issues and express political preference,
not as now with huge business lobbies which exercise undemocratic
power, but which carry political influence (appropriate to private,
rather than public, groupings) in national decision–making enterprise.
Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues
(medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest
(labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general
issues. These do not exist in America in quantity today. If they
did exist, they would be a significant politicizing and educative
force bringing people into touch with public life and affording
them means of expression and action. Today, giant lobby representatives
of business interests are dominant, but not educative. The Federal
government itself should counter the latter forces whose intent
is often public deceit for private gain, by subsidizing the preparation
and decentralized distribution of objective materials on all public
issues facing government.

Institutions and practices which stifle dissent should be abolished,
and the promotion of peaceful dissent should be actively promoted.
The first Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, thought, religion
and press should be seen as guarantees, not threats, to national
security. While society has the right to prevent active subversion
of its laws and institutions, it has the duty as well to promote
open discussion of all issues — otherwise it will be in fact promoting
real subversion as the only means to implementing ideas. To eliminate
the fears and apathy from national life it is necessary that the
institutions bred by fear and apathy be rooted out: the House Un–American
Activities Committee, the Senate Internal Security Committee, the
loyalty oaths on Federal loans, the Attorney General’s list of subversive
organizations, the Smith and McCarren Acts. The process of eliminating
these blighting institutions is the process of restoring democratic
participation. Their existence is a sign of the decomposition and
atrophy of the participation.

Corporations must be made publicly responsible. It is not possible
to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly
controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites
on foreign policy is neither reliable nor democratic; a way must
be found to be subordinate private American foreign investment to
a democratically–constructed foreign policy. The influence of the
same giants on domestic life is intolerable as well; a way must
be found to direct our economic resources to genuine human needs,
not the private needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered
citizenry.
We can no longer rely on competition of the many to insure that
business enterprise is responsive to social needs. The many have
become the few. Nor can we trust the corporate bureaucracy to be
socially responsible or to develop a "corporate conscience"
that is democratic. The community of interest of corporations, the
anarchic actions of industrial leaders, should become structurally
responsible to the people — and truly to the people rather than
to an ill–defined and questionable "national interest".
Labor and government as presently constituted are not sufficient
to "regulate" corporations. A new re–ordering, a new calling
of responsibility is necessary: more than changing "work rules"
we must consider changes in the rules of society by challenging
the unchallenged politics of American corporations. Before the government
can really begin to control business in a "public interest",
the public must gain more substantial control of government: this
demands a movement for political as well as economic realignments.
We are aware that simple government "regulation", if achieved,
would be inadequate without increased worker participation in management
decision–making, strengthened and independent regulatory power,
balances of partial and/or complete public ownership, various means
of humanizing the conditions and types of work itself, sweeping
welfare programs and regional public government authorities. These
are examples of measures to re–balance the economy toward public
— and individual — control.

The allocation of resources must be based on social needs. A
truly "public sector" must be established, and its nature
debated and planned. At present the majority of America’s "public
sector", the largest part of our public spending, is for the
military. When great social needs are so pressing, our concept of
"government spending" is wrapped up in the "permanent
war economy".
In fact, if war is to be avoided, the "permanent war economy"
must be seen as an "interim war economy". At some point,
America must return to other mechanisms of economic growth besides
public military spending. We must plan economically in peace. The
most likely, and least desirable, return would be in the form of
private enterprise. The undesirability lies in the fact of inherent
capitalist instability, noticeable even with bolstering effects
of government intervention. In the most recent post–war recessions,
for example, private expenditures for plant and equipment dropped
from $16 billion to $11.5 billion, while unemployment surged to
nearly six million. By good fortune, investments in construction
industries remained level, else an economic depression would have
occurred. This will recur, and our growth in national per capita
living standards will remain unsensational while the economy stagnates.
The main private forces of economic expansion cannot guarantee a
steady rate of growth, nor acceptable recovery from recession —
especially in a demilitarizing world. Government participation in
the economy is essential. Such participation will inevitably expand
enormously, because the stable growth of the economy demands increasing
"public" investments yearly. Our present outpour of more
than $500 billion might double in a generation, irreversibly involving
government solutions. And in future recessions, the compensatory
fiscal action by the government will be the only means of avoiding
the twin disasters of greater unemployment and a slackening rate
of growth. Furthermore, a close relationship with the European Common
Market will involve competition with numerous planned economies
and may aggravate American unemployment unless the economy here
is expanding swiftly enough to create new jobs.

All these tendencies suggest that not only solutions to our present
social needs but our future expansion rests upon our willingness
to enlarge the "public sector" greatly. Unless we choose
war as an economic solvent, future public spending will be of a
non–military nature — a major intervention into civilian production
by the government. The issues posed by this development are enormous:

How should public vs. private domain be determined? We suggest
these criteria:

when a resource has been discovered or developed
with public tax revenues, such as a space communications system,
it should remain a public source, not be given away to private enterprise;

when monopolization seems inevitable, the public should maintain
control of an industry;

when national objectives contradict seriously
with business objectives as to the use of the resource, the public
need should prevail.

How should technological advances be introduced into a society?
By a public process, based on publicly–determined needs. Technological
innovations should not be postponed from social use by private corporations
in order to protect investment in older equipment.

How shall the "public sector" be made public, and not
the arena of a ruling bureaucracy of "public servants"?
By steadfast opposition to bureaucratic coagulation, and to definitions
of human needs according to problems easiest for computers to solve.
Second, the bureaucratic pileups must be at least minimized by local,
regional, and national economic planning — responding to the interconnection
of public problems by comprehensive programs of solution. Third,
and most important, by experiments in decentralization, based on
the vision of man as master of his machines and his society. The
personal capacity to cope with life has been reduced everywhere
by the introduction of technology that only minorities of men (barely)
understand. How the process can be reversed — and we believe it can be — is one of the greatest sociological
and economic tasks before human people today. Polytechnical schooling,
with the individual adjusting to several work and life experiences,
is one method. The transfer of certain mechanized tasks back into
manual forms, allowing men to make whole, not partial, products,
is not unimaginable. Our monster cities, based historically on the
need for mass labor, might now be humanized, broken into smaller
communities, powered by nuclear energy, arranged according to community
decision. These are but a fraction of the opportunities of the new
era: serious study and deliberate experimentation, rooted in a desire
for human fraternity, may now result in blueprints of civic paradise.

America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities:
abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment
for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.

A program against poverty must be just as sweeping as the nature
of poverty itself. It must not be just palliative, but directed
to the abolition of the structural circumstances of poverty. At
a bare minimum it should include a housing act far larger than the
one supported by the Kennedy Administration, but one that is geared
more to low–and middleincome needs than to the windfall aspirations
of small and large private entrepreneurs, one that is more sympathetic
to the quality of communal life than to the efficiency of city–split
highways. Second, medical care must become recognized as a lifetime
human right just as vital as food, shelter and clothing — the Federal
government should guarantee health insurance as a basic social service
turning medical treatment into a social habit, not just an occasion
of crisis, fighting sickness among the aged, not just by making
medical care financially feasible but by reducing sickness among
children and younger people. Third, existing institutions should
be expanded so the Welfare State cares for everyone’s welfare according
to read. Social security payments should be extended to everyone
and should be proportionately greater for the poorest. A minimum
wage of at least $1.50 should be extended to all workers (including
the 16 million currently not covered at all). Equal educational
opportunity is an important part of the battle against poverty.

A full–scale public initiative for civil rights should be undertaken
despite the clamor among conservatives (and liberals) about gradualism,
property rights, and law and order. The executive and legislative
branches of the Federal government should work by enforcement and
enactment against any form of exploitation of minority groups. No
Federal cooperation with racism is tolerable — from financing of
schools, to the development of Federally–supported industry, to
the social gatherings of the President. Laws bastcuing school desegregation,
voting rights, and economic protection for Negroes are needed right
now. The moral force of the Executive Office should be exerted against
the Dixiecrats specifically, and the national complacency about
the race question generally. Especially in the North, where one–half
of the country’s Negro people now live, civil rights is not a problem
to be solved in isolation from other problems. The fight against
poverty, against slums, against the stalemated Congress, against
McCarthyism, are all fights against the discrimination that is nearly
endemic to all areas of American life.

The promise and problems of long–range Federal economic development
should be studied more constructively. It is an embarrassing paradox
that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a wonder to foreign visitors
but a "radical" and barely influential project to most
Americans. The Kennedy decision to permit private facilities to
transmit power from the $1 billion Colorado River Storage Project
is a disastrous one, interposing privately–owned transmitters between
public–owned power generators and their publicly (and cooperatively)
owned distributors. The contracy trend, to public ownership of power,
should be generated in an experimental way.

The Area Redevelopment Act of 1961 is a first step in recognizing
the underdeveloped areas of the United States, but is only a drop
in the bucket financially and is not keyed to public planning and
public works on a broad scale, but only to a few loan programs to
lure industries and some grants to improve public facilities to
"lure industries." The current public works bill in Congress
is needed and a more sweeping, higher priced program of regional
development with a proliferation of "TVAs" in such areas
as the Appalachian region are needed desperately. It has been rejected
by Mississippi already however, because of the improvement it bodes
for the unskilled Negro worker. This program should be enlarged,
given teeth, and pursued rigorously by Federal authorities.

We must meet the growing complex of "city" problems;
over 90% of Americans will live in urban areas in the next two decades.
Juvenile delinquency, untended mental illness, crime increase, slums,
urban tenantry and uncontrolled housing, the isolation of the individual
in the city — all are problems of the city and are major symptoms
of the present system of economic priorities and lack of public
planning. Private property control (the real estate lobby and a
few selfish landowners and businesses) is as devastating in the
cities as corporations are on the national level. But there is no
comprehensive way to deal with these problems now midst competing
units of government, dwindling tax resources, suburban escapism
(saprophitic to the sick central cities), high infrastructure costs
and on one to pay them. The only solutions are national and regional.
"Federalism" has thus far failed here because states are
rural–dominated; the Federal government has had to operate by bootlegging
and trickle–down measures dominated by private interests, and the
cities themselves have not been able to catch up with their appendages
through annexation or federation. A new external challenge is needed,
not just a Department of Urban Affairs but a thorough national program
to help the cities. The model city must be projected — more community
decision–making and participation, true integration of classes,
races, vocations — provision for beauty, access to nature and the
benefits of the central city as well, privacy without privatism,
decentralized "units" spread horizontally with central,
regional, democratic control — provision for the basic facility–needs,
for everyone, with units of planned regions and thus public, democratic
control over the growth of the civic community and the allocation
of resources.

Mental health institutions are in dire need; there were fewer
mental hospital beds in relation to the numbers of mentally–ill
in 1959 than there were in 1948. Public hospitals, too, are seriously
wanting; existing structures alone need an estimated $1 billion
for rehabilitation. Tremendous staff and faculty needs exist as
well, and there are not enough medical students enrolled today to
meet the anticipated needs of the future.

Our prisons are too often the enforcers of misery. They must
be either re–oriented to rehabilitative work through public supervision
or be abolished for their dehumanizing social effects. Funds are
needed, too, to make possible a decent prison environment.

Education is too vital a public problem to be completely entrusted
to the province of the various states and local units. In fact,
there is no good reason why America should not progress now toward
internationalizing rather than localizing, its educational system
— children and young adults studying everywhere in the world, through
a United Nations program, would go far to create mutual understanding.
In the meantime, the need for teachers and classrooms in America
is fantastic. This is an area where "minimal" requirements
hardly should be considered as a goal — there always are improvements
to be made in the educational system, e.g., smaller classes and
many more teachers for them, programs to subsidize the education
of the poor but bright, etc.

America should eliminate agricultural policies based on scarcity
and pent–up surplus. In America and foreign countries there exist
tremendous needs for more food and balanced diets. The Federal government
should finance small farmers’ cooperatives, strengthen programs
of rural electrification, and expand policies for the distribution
of agricultural surpluses throughout the world (by Foodfor –Peace
and related UN programming). Marginal farmers must be helped to
either become productive enough to survive "industrialized
agriculture" or given help in making the transition out of
agriculture –
the current Rural Area Development program must be better coordinated
with a massive national "area redevelopment" program.

Science should be employed to constructively transform the conditions
of life throughout the United States and the world. Yet at the present
time the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the National
Science Foundation together spend only $300 million annually for
scientific purposes in contrast to the $6 billion spent by the Defense
Department and the Atomic Energy Commission. One–half of all research
and development in America is directly devoted to military purposes.
Two imbalances must be corrected — that of military over non–military
investigation, and that of biological–natural–physical science over
the sciences of human behavior. Our political system must then include
planning for the human use of science: by anticipating the political
consequences of scientific innovation, by directing the discovery
and exploration of space, by adapting science to improved production
of food, to international communications systems, to technical problems
of disarmament, and so on. For the newly–developing nations, American
science should focus on the study of cheap sources of power, housing
and building materials, mass educational techniques, etc. Further,
science and scholarship should be seen less as an apparatus of conflicting
power blocs, but as a bridge toward supranational community: the
International Geophysical Year is a model for continuous further
cooperation between the science communities of all nations.

Alternatives to Helplessness

The goals we have set are not realizable next month, or even next
election — but that fact justifies neither giving up altogether
nor a determination to work only on immediate, direct, tangible
problems. Both responses are a sign of helplessness, fearfulness
of visions, refusal to hope, and tend to bring on the very conditions
to be avoided. Fearing vision, we justify rhetoric or myopia. Fearing
hope, we reinforce despair.

The first effort, then, should be to state a vision: what is the
perimeter of human possibility in this epoch? This we have tried
to do. The second effort, if we are to be politically responsible,
is to evaluate the prospects for obtaining at least a substantial
part of that vision in our epoch: what are the social forces that
exist, or that must exist, if we are to be at all successful? And
what role have we ourselves to play as a social force?